Mick Herron is a British mystery and thriller novelist. Herron was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a degree in English. In 2003, he published his first novel, Down Cemetery Road. It was the first volume in a four-book series about Zoë Boehm, an Oxford private detective.
In 2010, he began a spy series titled Slough House, with first volume Slow Horses, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the agency mainstream for various failures. The second volume in this series, Dead Lions, published in 2013, won the Crime Writers' Association 2013 Gold Dagger award. Herron has stated that the lead character, Jackson Lamb, was influenced by Reginald Hill's Andy Dalziel. As of December 2022, the series includes eight novels, plus several associated novellas, and events in related novels. Early volumes have also been adapted for television.
Slow Horses was published by Constable in 2010, but the firm declined the opportunity to publish the next book in the series in the United Kingdom due to disappointing sales of its predecessor. Soho published the Slough House novels in the United States, and John Murray started republishing the series in the UK …